The wu-ftpd server still runs when an ftp request is made, even although the file /etc/xinetd.d/wu-ftpd has the following line: disable = yes which is placed in /etc/xinetd.d/wu-ftpd by disabling wu-ftpd using the "setup" tool. Even if xinetd is sent a -HUP signal, wu-ftpd continues to respond to ftp requests. This happens if the ftp connection is from localhost or from a remote machine. My system is a clean install RH7 on a i686, with some services shutdown (sendmail, nfs etc).
So you changed this setting, and it continued to respond? (not the same as "respond if disable=yes")
I changed the line manually to disable = no and it responds to ftp requests - as expected. Maybe I'm reading man xinetd.conf wrong, but as far as I can see, disable = yes should override anything else and shut the service down. Maybe tcpserver from http://cr.yp.to/ should be included with RH7.1?
My interpretation of this is that you've modified the config file, kill -HUP'd xinetd, and your changes have not taken effect. If this is in fact the case, it should not work. As documented in the xinetd man page, a SIGHUP has xinetd dump it's debugging information. What you want is a SIGUSR2 to reconfigure xinetd.
That's what's used in "service xinetd reload".
Mmmm. OK, seems a bit wierd not to use a SIGHUP for reconfig, but I guess I should have RTFM'd a bit more. Guess this is resolved then - changing to not a bug. Cheers.